Being careful and using credit cards for protection is nothing new regarding any company let alone singling out Darkside. If you want to be covered for any items purchased in advance that are not released for about a year then dont use paypal! I have nothing to do with Darkside. I have bought from them with no problems. I have bought from geek toys/id/staraction/tosche with no problems. You might no more than me. I just fail to believe that a company that are trying to help peeps get this thing are being shamed and dont give me this " i didnt mention fraud " cos' we know exactly what you are getting at. Basically you are saying they are ripping people off and now it has caught up with them. I disagree. I may be wrong. I probably am. If anyone has pre ordered and payed for this thing then you can easily go thru paypal and get your money back right now if you are not happy so where is the problem? There is little or no chance that any of us over here will ever get to own the sail barge. Someone gives us a glimmer of hope and it's frowned upon. Even taking into account the £200 odd quid profit. This thing is huge and obvs there is gonna be more than 1 of them to ship over plus customs on them i reckon Darkside would probs be making £30-40 on them. So what? Theyre doing all the work. And if anyone doesnt like it then go find a way to get 1 yourself in my opinion.Just another example altho not on such an extreme level. I pre ordered some of the new black series stuff thats due out, vader helmet, gam guard etc from geek toys on Friday. So has someone else on echo but cos' he hasnt answered theyre pm they have gone into meltdown thinking thats it theyve been ripped off! The poor guy is on a stall at a show for the weekend trying to earn a living but has already been labelled a fraud buy a customer

Just incase its not been seen, an update on Darkside. They are having to limit the barge orders to 10 per day due to paypal thinking theyre laundering or whatever they wanna call it so it is still available you just have to be quick when they take the sold out option down on a Monday. Oh and Richard, please hopefully you havent took offence to anything ive said mate, its nothing personel, i just think these small businesses have a hard time surviving as it is and especially the 1's that are trying to help us collectors out to get something that would be nigh on impossible to own otherwise. I would love to live the dream and open a geeky type shop buying and selling plastic but there seems to be no help out there, backing or anything and before you know it they are gone almost as quickly as they started and peeps are either back on the dole or working in a factory at 5am all hours

That is a superb looking sailbarge. It’s weird because it kind of goes beyond the realm of the toy range and is more of a model/collectors item. Especially at that price. It would be an awesome man cave piece, sitting on a floating shelf. Would love one, not for me though.

Thanks to a very large late surge in buyers, the order count has shot up by nearly 1000 just today alone, and currently stands at close to 5,400. There's still 3 days left before the deadline, so who knows what the final total will be? I'm now hoping it goes as high as possible, as anyone still hoping to order one through Dark Side Toys will be disappointed as they have stopped taking any more orders. The hopes of non-US/Canadian collectors wanting one of these are therefore now wholly pinned on the 'small extra number' Hasbro have said they will make in addition to the HasLab website orders (which is apparently going to be the one and only way to get hold of one from Hasbro in the US and Canada), and which will be available in foreign markets. Hasbro haven't given any indication of how many the 'small extra number' will actually be, but it's reasonable to assume if their HasLab target of 5,000 is greatly exceeded, they may have more confidence in manufacturing a few more than they otherwise might have for those irrelevant countries that aren't the USA or Canada.

I must say, I think this whole process has been mishandled by Hasbro from start to finish, with non-domestic collectors being royally shafted. Yes, we might have a crack at owning one later down the line if we're lucky enough to get our hands on one of the 'small extra number' being made, but it wouldn't have killed Hasbro to put a mechanism in place whereby we could all have guaranteed ourselves one, like our US and Canadian friends can. Hasbro would have guaranteed themselves more sales, and we the customers would have been happy. As it is, even if we do manage to find one for sale over here next year, I don't doubt the price will be disproportionately higher than the US one!

I dislike crowd-funding for these types of products anyway, but when they're from very large and wealthy companies for extremely expensive, highly limited items like the Khetanna, Hasbro are simply slapping their foreign customers full in the face and showing us just how little we actually mean to them.

I'll still try to get a Khetanna next year, but I don't think I'll be holding my breath